DHCD Address Locator Tool

2. Methodology

This section is organized in the following way: each source of information has its own section and has the code used to create the final dataset. All dataset can be downloaded as a .csv or .pdf. Each section also has an R script that has more information about each data source.

2.1. DHCD Payment Standards

DHCD provides payment standards for 23 Metropolitan areas in the State of Massachusetts. All the cities and towns within each area share the same payment standard for units with 0 to 4 bedroom (Studios to 4-bedrooms units). The basic geographical unit is the boundaries of a city or a town. To update the DHCD Payment Standards file, there are several intermediate steps required to make the information useful.

2.1.1. DHCD Metropolitan Areas

As mention above, DHCD provides payment standards for 23 Metropolitan areas in the State of Massachusetts. The list of DHCD Metropolitan areas is consistent with HUD Fair Market Rents for existing housing regions for Massachusetts. To make this data easy to handle, it has been translated into the following Excel file. All our work regarding DHCD Payment Standard will take this file as the base file.

## Reading layer `ma_municipalities' from data source `/Users/lauticantar/Google Drive/DHCD-tool/data/shapefiles/ma_municipalities' using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
## Simple feature collection with 351 features and 5 fields
## geometry type:  MULTIPOLYGON
## dimension:      XY
## bbox:           xmin: -73.50821 ymin: 41.23875 xmax: -69.92751 ymax: 42.88678
## epsg (SRID):    4326
## proj4string:    +proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 +no_defs

To check that the original file covers all the cities and towns across the State of Massachusetts, we can do the following test. We downloaded a shapefile of all the municipalities in Massachusetts from MassGIS and compare the number of cities and towns between the original file and one downloaded. We can see in the map that all 351 municipalities in Massachusetts are included in our base file.

2.1.2. DHCD Regional Administering Agencies

DHCD divides its operation in 8 Regional Administering Agencies (RAA). A list of the cities and towns in each RAA is available at this link. In this section, this information is added to the Original File.

2.1.3. Zip codes and counties data

In order to add the zip codes to the file from point 2.1.2, we retrieve information regarding the zip codes from the Zipcodestogo.com. That information has been cleaned and merged with the original file.

2.1.4. DHCD Payment standards

DHCD Payment Standards are given by the following file. The following table has the same information but in a file format more compatible with the work flow of this document.

2.1.5. Final join

With the output of Section 2.1.3 and Section 2.1.4, we do a final join. This file is one of the inputs that the ALT is going to use.

2.2. HUD Small Area Fair Market Rent standards

The HUD Small Area Fair Market Rent are available to be downloaded from the following link Small Area FMRs ¹.As stated in their webpage, Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs) are FMRs calculated for ZIP Codes within Metropolitan Areas. This file is one of the inputs that the ALT is going to use.

2.3. GreatSchools.org data

Greatschools.org provides information about school quality and several other social and demographic indicators. The Address Locator Tool uses its data. To collect this data, we are going to use a “scraper” written in Python.

The final dataset has information for 5457 schools all across the state. You can download the data here:

Since our data has the latitude and the longitude of each school, the following map shows the location of it in the state.

2.4. diversitydatakids.org - Kirwan Institute Child Opportunity Index

The diversitydatakids.org - Kirwan Institute Child Opportunity Index is a comprehensive sociodemographic indicator that will be used as a proxy of the socio-demographic status of each census tract. The Child Opportunity Index combines 19 separate component indicators into a single metric: Very Low, Low, Moderate, High or Very High. For more technical information, click here.

The COI Index is calculated for 1368 census tracts, divided into four different metropolitan areas. In order to get the information for each one of the metropolitan areas, you can download the data from the following links:

The final dataset is the following:

2.5. The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Data

From the (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing)[https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/4868/affh-raw-data/] data we are going to use the following five indicators:

Please note that values are percentile ranked and range from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better. For more technical information, please reference here.